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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Brew It and They Will Come – The Karl Strauss Story

The Karl Strauss brewery tasting room.

Sometimes it’s easy to take things for granted.For instance, I have lived in San Diego my
entire life, so I sometimes forget how lucky I am to live in America’s Finest
City.While San Diegan beer lovers can’t
be accused of taking the San Diego craft beer scene for granted, I don’t know
if we always remember to be grateful for San Diego’s craft beer roots.After all, if it weren’t for Karl Strauss,
there might not even be a San Diego craft beer scene.Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner, founders of San Diego's Karl
Strauss brewery, truly are the pioneers of the San Diego craft beer
industry.

Chris Cramer telling the Karl Strauss brewery story.

I recently attended the Beer Bloggers Conference in San
Diego, and one of the evening events was hosted by the Karl Strauss Brewing
Company. Chris Cramer, CEO and
Co-Founder of Karl Strauss brewery, spoke at the event and shared with
us the story behind Karl Strauss.

Stanford Beginnings

Chris Cramer’s journey in the craft beer industry started
when he was a freshman at Stanford University in 1980. He saw an ad in the Stanford Daily for a bartending
class. He thought bartending would be a
great job because he could work at night, make some money, learn some skills,
and it wouldn’t hurt with the women either. Learning about what made alcoholic beverages taste
really good started a spark for Cramer.

During his next year at Stanford Cramer studied in England
for a quarter, at the same time the campaign for real ale was taking off. He found real ale was very different from the
beers he knew as a kid growing up in San Diego, mostly Bud Light, Coors Light,
and Miller Light. Cramer also spent time
that semester traveling around Europe by train, which gave him the opportunity
to visit Munich and drink really good German beer. During this time a light bulb when off in his
head and he thought, “Damn, there is a lot better stuff out there than what
most kids and undergraduates at Stanford are drinking.”

Karl Strauss brews better beers than had ever been tasted in San Diego previously.

When Cramer returned from Europe he saw another ad in the
Stanford Daily for bartenders, which turned out to be a job for a small bartending
business that provided bartending for the conference office and alumni
association of Stanford. Cramer ended up
buying the business. Soon thereafter
Cramer met Matt Rattner, who is now the President and Co-Founder of Karl
Strauss Brewing Company. Rattner joined
the bartending class and then worked with Cramer to organize the little
bartending business into one that ended up providing all alcoholic beverage
catering in Stanford. Along with
bartending Stanford events came the responsibility to cater to the tastes of
the international clientele coming to Stanford.
Cramer and Rattner had to start learning about better beers, better
wines, and better spirits. Tough job, right? They were learning about better beers like
Anchor Steam and Palo Alto Brewing Company’s real ale.

An Epiphany in Fremantle Australia

Cramer and Rattner decided they wanted to start some kind of
business somewhere, but they didn’t know what or where. After graduating with his MBA, and while
Rattner was still in business school, Cramer took some time to put a backpack
on his back and go traveling the world.
Cramer went to Fremantle, Australia for the America’s Cup. Cramer was always on the lookout for areas
where they were making better beers, wines, and spirits when traveling. In Fremantle he plopped down at the bar of an
establishment called the Sail and Anchor and ordered a pint of bitters. The bartender brought him a glass of beer
that changed his life. He took one sip
and was so surprised because it was so different from any of the other beers he
had ever had. He called the bartender
over and asked what kind of beer it was.
He learned it was made right on the premises and the bartender took him
around the side of the building to show him the little microbrewery. This was the first time Cramer had ever seen
a microbrewery. He had always thought of
microbreweries as large, unattainable productions like Anchor Brewing
Company. But here was something small
enough that he thought this was something he could do. In Cramer’s words, “I thought to myself, okay,
here is the place in the entire world more like San Diego than any other place
that I’ve ever been. Here’s beer that’s
differentiated from and better than any beer that I’ve ever had.” This is when the idea of the Karl Strauss brewery was born.

Uncle Karl

Cramer had an ace up his sleeve. He was related to Karl Strauss, a world
famous brewer. Karl Strauss was born in
Minden, Germany in 1912. Karl Strauss
grew up inside his father’s brewery and had the opportunity to get involved in
all the brewery operations. The only
thing he ever wanted to do was become a brewer.
Karl Strauss attended university in Munich and graduated in 1933 with a
degree in the science and practice of malting and brewing. He left Germany in March of 1939 and came to
the United States. On his way to
California he stopped in Milwaukee to visit some friends from his
hometown. His friends took him to a
local beer festival where he saw lots of Germans drinking good lager beer and
decided he didn’t need to go to California, as there was good beer in
Milwaukee. His friends told him there
was an opening at Pabst Brewing, so Karl Strauss went the next day and applied
for a position in the bottling plant.
After one look at his resume they hired him on the spot. Here was a real brewer from Germany at a time
after the repeal of prohibition when they couldn’t get German brewers into the
United States. Karl Strauss quickly
moved out of bottling and up through the ranks of brewers until he ultimately became
vice president of productions and master brewer for all of Pabst Brewing
operations. Karl Strauss worked at Pabst
Brewing for a total of 44 years, the last 25 of which he ran five major
breweries across the United States. Karl
Strauss was considered one of the three most famous brewers in the world, was
the past president of the Master Brewers Association of The Americas, and was
the only person ever to have won the association’s three highest honors. Karl Strauss was also co-author of The Practical Brewer and an active
member of the American Society of Brewing Chemists up until the day he died at
the age of 94 in December of 2006.

Karl Strauss appears on the brewery wall and every bottle of the original Karl Strauss Amber.

Cramer’s trip to Fremantle started him thinking, “Gosh, if
it worked down in Freemantle, which is so like San Diego, why can’t we have
good beer here in San Diego too? Why do
we have to drink all of this nondescript beer rather than these really
interesting beers that I would pay a lot more money for?” So when Cramer returned from Australia, he
cornered Uncle Karl at a family party and started asking him about the microbrewing
concept he had seen in Fremantle and asked him if he would be interested in
doing a project with him. Karl Strauss
stopped, thought for a second, and responded, “You know Chris, I think this
could be the wave of the future!” Cramer
was the first person in the family who had ever expressed an interest in Karl
Strauss’s craft, and Strauss was delighted.
With Karl Strauss’s brewing expertise and Cramer’s and Rattner’s
business training, they set out on an odyssey together to start the first new
brewery in the city of San Diego in more than 50 years.

Creating the First Karl Strauss Brewery

Cramer and Rattner discussed how they could succeed, as
nobody in San Diego had ever had a craft beer or anything remotely like craft
beer. They wondered how they could get
San Diegans to be interested in such a thing, how they could create bridges
from what people knew and were happy with to things that were unknown to them
and get them to take a chance. They
thought about examples that had already happened, how Californians had gone
down a path towards better wine, better coffee, better cheeses, and better food. They decided they needed to create an
environment where they could get people to come in and try these styles of
beers in a comfortable setting, explain what made Karl Strauss’s beers so exceptional
and different, and then hopefully convert them and create raving fans for these
new styles of beers.

From a dream to a laundry list of craft beers.

Cramer and Rattner wrote a business plan for what they
called the Neighborhood Brewing Company.
They sent out an executive summary to family and friends who were
interested in investing. Once they had
backers they needed to build both a biological manufacturing process, a
brewery, and conjoin it with a successful restaurant operation. They knew it would have to be in a place that
would give them access to the influence leaders in the community. They chose a location in downtown San Diego,
on the corner of Columbia and B Street, in an old mechanics bay that had been
converted into an architect’s office. Disaster
almost hit when it was time to obtain an ABC license. California at the time was not able to allow
people to get an ABC license until the brewery was installed and
operational. One morning Cramer got a
telephone call stating that because of a loophole in the law, the license would
not be issued. Cramer could see his
dream turning into bankruptcy. He spent
the next month in hell, running around the state of California all the way up
to the director of the entire ABC and convincing him they had relied upon the
representations of the ABC to make the investment. The director ended up freezing every other
license in process in the state until the legislature changed the law and
closed the loophole.

The original Karl Strauss brewery restaurant.

The last preopening party occurred on February 1, 1989. It was the night before they were going to
open up to the public and all the media and VIPs in San Diego were there. After the party, Cramer and Rattner looked at
each other as they walked out the door, turning off the lights, turning on the
alarm system, knowing that the next day if people did not come immediately, if
they didn’t spend money, they were going to go bankrupt and lose
everything. They stopped at the front
door and said to each other, “Will people come?” Fortunately the next day came and people were
lined up around the block. The
restaurant started off doing 100% more sales volume than the kitchen was ever
designed to do at the Karl Strauss downtown location, which was a problem. But fortunately, from day one the beer was
right. Karl Strauss’s beers were phenomenal. People would come in, taste the beers, and
almost universally say the same thing, that it was the best beer they’d ever
tasted.

Karl Strauss Today

Some of the many awards won by Karl Strauss beer.

The rest is history.
Karl Strauss brewery is now the 41st largest craft brewer in the
entire United States. In addition to the
distributing brewery operations they have eight Karl Strauss brewery restaurants in Southern
California. Karl Strauss is the featured
beer of the Disney Resort in Anaheim and one of the most award winning brewing
companies in the world in the last five years.
In the last four years alone they have won 64 major medals in
competitions and Karl Strauss Red Trolley Ale is arguably one of the most, if
not the most, awarded beer in the world, having won the gold medal at the World
Beer Cup two out of the last three World Beer Cups and two out of the last four
GABFs as the best Irish Red in the world.

Peter Rowe, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune,
recently said that Karl Strauss not only launched the craft beer industry in
San Diego, but also taught consumers that beer can be consistently good when
crafted locally. Above and beyond that,
he said Karl Strauss inspired the revolution.
The DNA of Karl Strauss brewery runs throughout the San Diego
brewing industry. When Karl Strauss opened
on February 2, 1989, Gina Marsaglia was a cocktail waitress. She since started Port Brewing Company/The
Lost Abbey. On the other side of the bar
was bartender Scott Stamp. Scott Stamp
later started San Diego Brewing Company.
The tour guide on opening day was Jack White who later went on to start
Ballast Point Brewing Company.

So now as I sit here writing this, drinking a Karl Strauss
Amber, San Diego’s original session beer, I am grateful for what Karl Strauss
did for the San Diego craft beer industry.
And while we will continue to be excited for every new craft brewery
that pops up in the city, we should always remember that without Karl Strauss,
San Diego’s craft brewing industry may have never existed.

Katherine Belarmino has been traveling for over ten years on a quest to see as much of the world as possible, experience new cultures, and sample other cuisines and libations. She also writes the travel blog Travel the World, which journals her world travels with her husband Romeo and seeks to encourage others to take the time to travel.

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About Us

Steve Grams is a father of two who has spent his married life traveling to the world's beer capitals. He aims to support local beverage makers and bring some extra attention to these communities' first craftsmen.

Katherine Belarmino has been traveling the world for over 10 years with her husband. She loves to experience as much as she can in every destination, including the local beers, wines, and cocktails. She also writes the travel blog Travel the World.